“There lit-e-rally”—his fingers tapped the syllables in the air; the man could veer toward the pedantic when frazzled—“couldn’t be a worse time.”
Five weeks earlier, he had filled their apartment with lilies and popped a champagne cork, though they filled her glass with Sprite. He got down on one knee and cried a little, held out a hand for hers. She said yes, but he made her repeat it two, three times, until they were both laughing.
“I want to see it,” she said.
“But it’s not going anywhere,” he countered. “What’s the urgency?”
But that was precisely it—the urgency was there was no urgency. There never would be. For years she watched news reports of the settlements, the phosphorus dropped over Gaza, camps swelling with eyeless children. Anger held her up with burning little hands, assembled itself into chants of Free Palestine, free, free Palestine with the rest of the Justice for Palestine group during Apartheid Week at Columbia. For years she kept a poster taped above her desk of a young man mid-hurl, a stone flying in the air. Along the border were sentences calligraphed in Arabic. His arm arched like an arrow, his face hidden beneath a scarf. The stone had just left his fingertips. A part of her knew such posters were romanticism, envy at best. Still, she hoped he hit what he was aiming for.
The sun dips into the sea. From Manar’s table, she can make out a fisherman on a distant rock. At the table next to hers, a brunette in an expensive-looking dress sits with two men, laughing and talking. There are two bottles of arak on the table, the plates littered with fish bones and napkins. The men are handsome, fair-skinned. The bearded one looks over at Manar several times and smiles.
Manar busies herself with the menu, aware of how sensual the air feels, the beauty of the seascape around her. Throughout her time here, the awful facts—checkpoints, soldiers, camps—are often softened by captivating landscapes.
“Yes, madame? Are you ready?” An older waiter appears at her side. Something about the flower he has tucked into his lapel, jaunty and red, reminds Manar of her father.
She smiles up at him. “Muhammara. And whatever else you recommend.”
“Ah, what a responsibility.” The man pretends to study the sea, then snaps his fingers. Even his profile has something of Elie in it, the lifted chin, the hawkish nose. “Hammour, grilled, with green beans and potatoes, hummus on the side.”
“Perfect.”
“And anything to drink? We have wine, arak . . .”
“Just water, please.”
“Water,” the waiter repeats. He approves.
Wherever she goes, she keeps the letters in her purse, wrapped in tissue paper and bound with twine.
Zain gave them to her the last time he visited from Boston. “Take these with you,” he said, holding out the parcel, and she blinked back tears. They were his prized possession, prized being the operative word, as he had stolen—borrowed, he insisted—the letters years ago and never returned them.
“Zuzu,” she began, but he held a hand up.
“You should have them out there. You can try to find things in the letters, maybe even the house.”
She had felt the urge then to tell him everything, about the baby, about Gabe’s proposal, confessing—Yes, he was married, but it wasn’t working anyway, she went back to Iowa with her family, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep the baby but I can’t seem to get rid of it, I love him but he’s so American, sometimes I feel suffocated by everything I have to explain to him—all the things she will have to tell the family. But she simply held her hand out, took the bundle.
“Thanks.”
The letters have stayed with Zain all these years. During the summers he brings them to Beirut, where the family gathers for long weeks. The four of them—Linah, Zain, Manar, and Abdullah—sit out on the balcony, lighting cigarettes and discussing the letters. Abdullah helped translate the passages from Arabic, as the rest of them confused tenses and verbs. They talk about the letters like a book, their grandfather writing about the war in Nablus, his years in Kuwait. The people he refers to—a dead great-uncle, old friends, their own parents—seem as exotic as characters in a movie, and as unlikely.
She knows some of the passages by heart. I worry about the children. Sometimes I wake up in this city, look out at the desert. I swear I can hear the adan in Nablus. I can hear Abu Nabil hawking his bread. Brother, I can smell your cigarette, hear you telling me to hurry.
They come up with theories, what he has told their grandmother, what is secret. They’re not supposed to have the letters, they know this much. The filching has made them precious.
Manar’s status as the other woman was a technicality; Gabe’s wife had already left when Manar met him. Manar loved his neuroses, his flaws, the smattering of hair on his shoulders and back that he hated, saying it made him feel beastlike. His tenderness. He wept openly during wedding speeches and made a point, every single night before bed, of cupping her face and saying I love you.
She told Gabriel everything. About her chaotic childhood, chubby daughter of bickering parents, dragged from Paris to Boston to Beirut. Half Palestinian, half Lebanese. How she would make herself ill on the first day of school—the other children always mocked her glasses, called her May-nard—once drinking curdled milk that had cramped her stomach for days. She told Gabe about her parents’ divorce, her love for her father and her disdain for her mother.
After the divorce, she claimed her father for herself, but sometimes she is envious of Zain’s resentment, the way he still calls him Elie instead of Baba or Dad. She wishes she could wash her hands of her father, fault him for everything. But that would be relinquishing a lovely, familiar topography. She told Gabe of the truce they’d called, she and her mother, though she still felt waves of rage toward her at times. Of how a fight over parking last year ended with Manar, twenty-four years old, screaming like a teenager, We weren’t your children, we were your audience.
She told him about sitting in classrooms that smelled of chalk and sweat listening to teachers chatter about Salinger and decimal fractions and the ancient Romans, or listening to her friends during recess, all of whom were awfully in love with some boy or another, but how only half of Manar was there. How her history professor once said Arabs instead of terrorists while discussing 9/11, and everyone turned to stare at Manar, her skin burning like a flag.
She told him about how the only times in school that she’d felt crystallized into her whole self were when she walked down the silent hallways, stepped into the empty bathroom, and looked at herself multiplied in the small mirrors above the sinks, the smell around her bleach and piss.
“It’s just three weeks,” she’d told Gabe. “I’ll be fine.”
“Let me come with you.”